The Christians Who Became Jews: Acts of the Apostles and Ethnicity in the Roman City (Synkrisis)

When considering Jewish identity in Acts of the Apostles, scholars have often emphasized Jewish and Christian religious difference, an emphasis that masks the intersections of civic, ethnic, and religious identifications in antiquity. This book explores the depiction of Jewish and Christian identity by analyzing ethnicity within a broader material and epigraphic context. Examining Acts through a new lens, the book shows that the text presents Jews and Jewish identity in multiple, complex ways, in order to legitimate the Jewishness of Christians. The book begins with an overview of the importance of ethnicity and ethnic rhetoric to the formation of ancient Christian identity. It then situates Acts of the Apostles historically and examines previous scholarship on Jewish identity and Acts before moving on to focus on the production of Jewish identity and difference in Acts 2:5–13. The book assesses how Acts of the Apostles uses the image of Jewishness constructed in Acts 2:5–13 to depict the Jewishness of Christian non-Jews in the Jerusalem council (15:1–21), and explores how Acts of the Apostles and the Salutaris Foundation inscription each uses ethnic reasoning together with civic and imperial space to produce unified identities. The book concludes that Acts of the Apostles' rhetoric of Jewish and Christian identity should be situated within the context of Roman-era cities, in which ethnic, civic, and religious identities were inseparable. Placing Acts within this broader ethnic discourse emphasizes the Jewishness of Christians, even in Acts. A fresh look at Acts of the Apostles and its depiction of Jewish identity within the larger Roman era When considering Jewish identity in Acts of the Apostles, scholars have often emphasized Jewish and Christian religious difference, an emphasis that masks the intersections of civic, ethnic, and religious identifications in antiquity. Christopher Stroup’s innovative work explores the depiction of Jewish and Christian identity by analyzing ethnicity within a broader material and epigraphic context. Examining Acts through a new lens, he shows that the text presents Jews and Jewish identity in multiple, complex ways, rather than as a simple foil for Christianity. Stroup convincingly argues that when the modern distinctions among ethnic, religious, and civic identities are suspended, the innovative ethnic rhetoric of the author of Acts comes into focus. The author of Acts leverages the power of gods, ancestry, and physical space to legitimate Christian identity as a type of Jewish identity and to present Christian non-Jews as Jewish converts through the power of the Holy Spirit. A fresh look at Acts of the Apostles and its depiction of Jewish identity within the larger Roman era

When considering Jewish identity in Acts of the Apostles, scholars have often emphasized Jewish and Christian religious difference, an emphasis that masks the intersections of civic, ethnic, and religious identifications in antiquity. Christopher Stroup’s innovative work explores the depiction of Jewish and Christian identity by analyzing ethnicity within a broader material and epigraphic context. Examining Acts through a new lens, he shows that the text presents Jews and Jewish identity in multiple, complex ways, in order to legitimate the Jewishness of Christians. "The author compares the depiction of Jewish and Christian identity in the Acts of the Apostles with portrayals of civic identity in contemporaneous material and epigraphic remains to demonstrate how the author of Acts identifies Christians with Jewish associations and legitimates an idealized image of Christian gatherings in ways similar to elite negotiations of civic identity. This study provides a recontextualization of Acts and its depiction of Jewish identity within larger Roman era discourses that configured the relations between gods and humans along ancestral and civic lines"-- Provided by publisher